Microsoft Advertising is designed for data-driven marketers like you. And the network is larger and more powerful than you might think.
Through
MSN,
Outlook.com, and
Microsoft Edge — as well as the
Microsoft Search Network (Bing and Yahoo) — Microsoft Advertising reaches
more than half a billion people worldwide. There are more than 10 billion monthly searches on the Microsoft Search Network, which accounts for 35% of searches on PC computers in the United States.
Microsoft Advertising is getting even better. We're now the only platform to offer
LinkedIn Profile Targeting on search and native. This targeting capability enables you to reach audiences based on the target’s company, job function, industry and more — for search and native ads.
Similarly,
LinkedIn now combines professional and user interest targeting options with its recently released
interest targeting product, which includes Bing search data.
More insight into how Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn work together for you is available in a new guide,
“The Dynamic Duo: How to Leverage Microsoft and LinkedIn to Drive Demand.”
In addition to advertising options, both Microsoft and LinkedIn offer free of charge organic pathways to reach your target customers.
Read on for a three-step process for maximizing Microsoft and LinkedIn for organic marketing and paid advertising.
Step 1: Build a compelling organic presence
Both Microsoft Advertising (through its Search and Audience Networks) and LinkedIn (through its LinkedIn Pages for brands, companies, and organizations) offer ample opportunities to reach wide audiences organically.
Microsoft Advertising
Establish your online presence and grow your audience organically on the Microsoft Search Network.
- Adding your business free of charge on Bing Places for Business, for instance, helps marketers establish their online presence as millions of customers search information about local businesses on Bing. It’s no secret that having accurate and rich business information published on a search engine like Bing improves chances of more in-store visits and more traffic to your website.
- Opening a free Bing Webmaster Tools account helps your business get indexed quickly and maximizes your website’s performance on Bing with site traffic analytics and site optimization tools to create SEO optimized pages.
LinkedIn Pages
You can further expand your organic footprint on
LinkedIn Pages, the next generation of Company Pages. With LinkedIn Pages, you can attract followers and have an ongoing conversation with your target audiences on LinkedIn — all for free.
Creating organic, free content is one way to reach a broad audience and start to get the word out about your products and services — at little to no cost to you. When it comes to organic strategy, LinkedIn offers four key tips:
- Be consistent: We see LinkedIn customers gaining successful and consistent engagement when they post on their LinkedIn Pages at least once a day.
- Repurpose where possible: Brands can share their story on their LinkedIn Pages by repurposing infographics, blog posts, videos, links to events, eBooks, and webinars.
- Tap into industry trends and news: @mention people who are affiliated with a specific piece of content to gain exposure to their network.
- Add hashtags to your post to join trending conversations: Keep an eye on the headlines on LinkedIn and Bing — those can be a great resource to see timely stories that are gaining momentum on LinkedIn.
Step 2: Boost your reach and engagement via paid advertising
Beyond reaching their target market via organic methods, marketers can reach a wider audience with paid advertising across a suite of products on Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn platforms.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft Advertising reaches more than a half a billion people globally through a range of properties:
- MSN
- Outlook.com
- Microsoft Edge
- Microsoft Search Network (Bing and Yahoo), which powers billions of online searches on Verizon Media properties (AOL, Yahoo), platforms such as Amazon and Apple, and on Microsoft services like Windows, Office and Edge.
And, now we are the only ad platform to offer LinkedIn Profile targeting on search and native.
This offering enables you to reach audiences based on the target’s company, job function, industry and more.
LinkedIn
Drawing from data of its 645 million members, LinkedIn offers you data-driven targeting for use with a variety of formats, including LinkedIn Sponsored Content and LinkedIn Sponsored InMail, to generate high quality leads. With LinkedIn, you can target decision makers and other LinkedIn members based on their company, industry, job experience, education, and interests.
LinkedIn’s recently released
interest targeting product now includes Bing search data. This combination enables you to combine professional demographic and user interest data to increase the scale of your marketing efforts, improve your targeting and boost ROI.
Step 3: Measure, learn and optimize to drive more impact
Both Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn offer tracking tools that help you ascertain what programs are working and how to optimize those programs to deliver measurable results.
Microsoft Advertising
Intelligent insights provide you with data to gauge how your campaigns are performing and how you can optimize them for peak performance. Here are four key tools for you:
- Opportunity Tab: It offers suggestions to improve campaign performance.
- Competition Tab: It tracks competitor performance over time and offers recommended actions for your advertising.
- Performance Insights: It tracks performance changes instantly.
- Location Recommendations: It provides suggestions on new areas to target with estimated audience volume.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn tools can help you quickly assess how your campaigns are performing and adjust accordingly. For instance, with
LinkedIn Conversion Tracking, you can measure how your campaign is producing specific conversion events, such as members of the target audience registering for a webinar. Additionally,
LinkedIn’s Website Demographics tools enable you to gauge whether the right audiences are visiting your entire website and even specific web pages.
To dive into more detail about how you can use Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn to communicate with your target audiences,
download our new guide, “The Dynamic Duo: How to Leverage Microsoft and LinkedIn to Drive Demand,” today.